There seems to be a vocal minority that are deeply concerned about the invasion of privacy caused by Google Glass. So much so, in fact, that there’s now a petition on We The People to ban the hardware until Google fixes what these people consider to be serious issues.

It takes absolutely no effort, or really even a particularly strong grasp of English to create a White House petition. We The People was designed to make it as easy as possible to get the attention of the White House if enough people agreed with your petition, and it has yielded positive results.

The chief concern of those who are in direct opposition of Google Glass is the potential for this hardware to be used to take photos or record video of someone without their knowing. There’s no recording light or anything when you use the camera on Glass, and that makes people uncomfortable. Furthermore, the open source nature of Android makes it so anyone can make Glass do things that weren’t intended by its creator.

This may seem a little silly, and that’s because it is. There are dozens of other electronic devices out there that record without a notification light, and that are capable of either wirelessly sharing their recorded content to the Internet or storing it to be extracted and used later. In this aspect, there is nothing unique about Glass at all.

While groups like Stop the Cyborgs, who refused a live interview with Geek.com, continue to pretend that Google Glass is a new way to record your fellow man, the truth of wearable computers gets lost in the discussion. Glass as it exist right now and at the price point the explorer program was set at, is impractical for a full consumer release. The goal behind this limited release is to crowdsource the possibilities of the design, with the specific intention of seeing the usage evolve as it is used and improved. Instead of participating in that conversation in a rational way, we get signs that are meant to ban Glass and the intent to spread general distrust for the hardware, eventually leading to a petition for the White House written by people who are only aware of the technology by rough description.

In the end, this is exactly why Google shouldn’t do or say anything about the people so distrusting of Glass right now. If Google were to release a statement or a video about the use of Glass, or if they were to explain that Glass can only record video for 20 minutes on a full charge, or that the hardware is really terribly designed for surveillance, that immediately diminishes the potential of the hardware. Exploration is critical in order to answer the basic questions that will ultimately define the finished product. How people will use the hardware, and what they want to use it for are both questions that can only be answered by trial and error.

Like any of a dozen other pieces of hardware out there, you can use Glass to record someone. This is an inescapable truth. If we live in the perpetual fear of what a given piece of technology could be used for, we’d never progress any further. That’s not to say that there aren’t real privacy dangers out there that need to be addressed, but the unhealthy assumption that technology will be used for evil simply by existing is not going to get you anywhere.